


Commit Change

by dancinguniverse



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, alternate season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-08-29 13:15:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16744687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinguniverse/pseuds/dancinguniverse
Summary: In which Dinesh and Gilfoyle are in a relationship, there is no Tesla, and season 5 otherwise unfolds more or less the same.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to BYO Cryptid for lots of helpful comments, and assorted other readers for cheerleading and hand-holding.

The ride back to the house is quiet. Dinesh looks over a few times, opening his mouth to complain. Something along the lines of, _can you believe him?_ But the look on Gilfoyle’s face silences him. Yeah, he made fun, but he knows how much time, how much effort, Gilfoyle had put into Anton. Dinesh knows the feeling of working so hard for so long, only to have someone stomp all over your efforts, like a child kicking over a sandcastle.

Anyway, Dinesh is pretty sure Gilfoyle’s not going to cry, but he’d rather let them get home before he tests that theory.

Gilfoyle parks the van in the driveway and just sits for a moment, staring at the garage. Dinesh knows he’s seeing the empty concrete, the hole left where his greatest accomplishment used to live.

“Fuck Richard,” Dinesh bursts out, the first words he’s said since they left Stanford. “Fuck him upside down and sideways!”

“Yeah,” is all Gilfoyle responds. He unclips his seatbelt and slides out of the van. Dinesh follows him into the house. Gilfoyle heads immediately into the bathroom, and Dinesh heads into the kitchen to wait. He pulls open a few cupboards absently. It’s early still, but he doesn’t know if he wants coffee or alcohol. Or both, he guesses, and starts a pot brewing. It’s something to do, anyway, and Dinesh doesn’t feel like looking at his computer right now.

Gilfoyle enters the kitchen a few minutes later, hooking a heel around the leg of a chair and pulling it out to sit down at the table. His eyes look red, and Dinesh finishes placing the coffee pot into its slot and walks over to stand behind him, pressing a hand to his shoulder. They’ve been fucking for over a year, and they’ve even gotten comfortable with regular cuddling, but it’s not often that either of them has asked for or offered much in the way of traditional emotional support. Dinesh figures this is a special sort of day.

“Are you okay?” His voice is softer than normal. He can be supportive when he needs to be.

“Fucking great,” Gilfoyle grunts, and then cranes his neck to look up at Dinesh. “What are you doing?”

_Being nice_ , is on the tip of Dinesh’s tongue when he realizes that Gilfoyle’s eyes are back to normal. “Oh thank God,” he says instead. He’s not totally setting aside the appeal of those contacts for some night he hasn’t detailed out yet, but as a normal accessory he just can’t handle them.

“Eighteen hours with them was not helping my mood,” Gilfoyle agrees, and Dinesh realizes his red eyes aren’t indicative of his emotional state. He snatches his hand away.

“Mine either,” he says, but he’s not sure it sounds convincing. He crosses the kitchen to pull two mugs out of the cupboard. The coffeemaker has started to hiss and gurgle.

Gilfoyle is staring at his back, eyes narrowed a little. It has to be more in thought than focus since Dinesh knows he’s not much more than a blur from this distance. Gilfoyle is lucky to tell Dinesh from a coat rack at three feet away.

“Wait. Did you think I was crying because of Richard?”

“No,” Dinesh says, annoyed. This is what he gets for being nice, to his fucking boyfriend of all people. He pulls the cream out of the refrigerator. Gilfoyle doesn’t always doctor his coffee, but he does when he’s drinking it for comfort or pleasure instead of for the mere caffeine jolt. Dinesh figures this counts as comfort coffee.

“But you did think I was crying.”

Dinesh scowls at the mugs, placing Gilfoyle’s in front of him with more force than necessary, though he’s careful not to slop the coffee over its sides. “Sue me for giving a damn, Gilfoyle. It was a shitty morning.”

“It was a shitty two days.”

“Yeah, but…” Gilfoyle frowns at him, expectant, so Dinesh finishes awkwardly. “Anton.”

Gilfoyle’s frown, if anything, deepens. “You thought if I was crying it was over the server I built? Not the years of work I put into this stupid company, the way we collectively fucked over Jared and Bighead, the collapse of our professional lives as we know them?”

Well. When he puts it like that. Dinesh sinks down into the chair opposite Gilfoyle, deflating. He takes a sip of his coffee, thinking over it all. “It’s been a shitty year.”

Gilfoyle snorts and bumps his mug against Dinesh’s with a clink of agreement. Dinesh turns his own mug in his hands. “What are we gonna do? I don’t think I even remember what I was doing with my app.”

“I got scooped,” Gilfoyle admits. “I saw my idea on the app store two months ago. I got nothing.”

“We could get jobs somewhere else?”

“If we haven’t been blackballed.”

“I could move back home,” Dinesh says, and shudders. His mother would be delighted to have him back, and his father would find him a job in Chicago. And he would get up each day and go to work and come home until he couldn’t stand the sight of himself in the mirror. The programmer who couldn’t make it in the city built by technology. He can’t take the idea of Wajeed being the cool California cousin.

“Would you?” Gilfoyle’s voice is as flat as ever, but Dinesh looks up.

“No, man. Are you kidding me? No. Not a chance.”

Gilfoyle doesn’t respond right away. Dinesh feels a tight curl of self-satisfaction in his stomach when he sees the tiny smile pulling up the side of Gilfoyle’s mouth, almost invisible past the fall of hair against his cheek. “Oh my God. You were worried I was going to leave.”

“Why would I worry about that?” Gilfoyle challenges immediately. “I could—”

“You were gonna miss me like a little girl,” Dinesh interrupts, flush with pride. “You would be heartbroken.”

“You wouldn’t last a week before you’d come crawling back,” Gilfoyle accuses, but Dinesh just shakes his head.

“No, this is about you. You love me, dude.”

“Yeah, obviously,” Gilfoyle snaps, which shuts Dinesh up. He never knows how to answer when Gilfoyle just comes out with stuff like that, especially when he never takes it back afterward. And he only sounds like an asshole arguing about it.

“Not fair,” he complains, slumping back in his seat.

Gilfoyle kicks his chair back and stands. “Come on. I want to kick your ass at Destiny. It’ll make me feel better.”

“I had a shitty day too,” Dinesh complains, though he stands to follow Gilfoyle.

“So I’ll blow you afterwards,” Gilfoyle says, and Dinesh stops arguing.

They stop to gather snacks and refill their coffees, and Gilfoyle is rummaging through the liquor cabinet for something to spike their coffee with when Dinesh’s pocket buzzes. He pulls it out and checks it before he can think better of it, but it’s not Richard. If it were, he might have thrown it across the room. Instead, it’s Jared, and while he doesn’t really want to talk to Jared either, he feels guilty enough about how he left that he opens the message.

“Gilfoyle,” he says, still staring down at the screen.

“What?”

He holds up his phone.

Gilfoyle looks at him, unimpressed, eyes still red and unaided. “I can’t fucking read it.”

“How were you going to play then?” Dinesh demands, but he tucks the phone back in his pocket. “Jared says he and Richard are heading over to Melchor’s office to come clean. He thinks we might want to be there for the end of it all. And he says Richard has seen the error of his ways.”

Gilfoyle snorts. “I doubt that.”

“Yeah.” He pauses a beat. There’s a weirdly unresolved feeling to ending up back at Erlich’s house after everything, even though they’d been living there before Pied Piper became the focus of all their lives. “We could go watch him get yelled at one last time.” Gilfoyle cocks his head, considering, and Dinesh knows he has him, even before he adds, “You can always kick my ass at Destiny and blow me later.”

“Deal.”

On the plus side, they not only get to see Richard get yelled at, but also punched in the head. Repeatedly.

Well, to be fair, Dan Melcher mostly tackles and then slaps him, and he only gets in a few blows before Jared is dragging him away, all those long limbs at last useful for something. But it’s still cathartic to watch.

On the other plus side, their company and careers are not in fact in tatters, which leaves Dinesh feeling relieved, but also with some emotional whiplash. By the time they get back to the house for the second time that day, he feels as if he hasn’t slept in a week instead of just two days. He must be getting old.

Their coffee mugs are still sitting on the kitchen table where he and Gilfoyle left them, back when they thought Pied Piper was in pieces littering the highway. No wonder it seems like a long day. It’s barely lunchtime.

Dinesh heads down the hall to his room and closes the door behind him, sinking down onto his bed. He’s still staring at the ring-shaped stain on his carpet, left from some previous tenant, when his door opens again. Gilfoyle enters, and Dinesh remembers his earlier promise. “You’re gonna have to kick my ass later,” he says, flopping over on the bed instead of getting up. “I’m too tired.”

“My eyeballs still hurt,” Gilfoyle admits, and nudges Dinesh over with his hip until he can sprawl out next to him.

“Take off your shoes,” Dinesh mutters without opening his eyes. He’d kicked his own shoes off the moment he got inside. There’s a shuffle, and Gilfoyle shifts next to him, the mattress rocking, before two distinctive thumps sound.

A head nudges onto his shoulder, and Dinesh wiggles until their arms slide into comfortable hollows of shoulders and between pillows.

“So we’re staying,” Gilfoyle says, but Dinesh can hear the question in his inflectionless tone.

He feels like if he weren’t so exhausted he’d be panicking more at the assumption that this is a joint decision. It was different, standing in front of the Stanford computing building. That was about presenting a united front to Richard. This is different, Dinesh is pretty sure, but he’s too tired to dig into why. And anyway, it’s a moot point, since apparently neither of them have any viable work ideas. He heaves out a sigh, feeling Gilfoyle’s head slide on his shoulder as he does. He resettles it, closer than before, his beard tickling at Dinesh’s throat. “We didn’t really have any good alternatives.”

“Sad, but true.”

“And it’s still our best shot at getting rich.”

Gilfoyle makes a neutral sound, and it buzzes pleasantly against Dinesh’s shoulder. “We should come up with some fall-back ideas. For next time.”

“Later,” Dinesh says, too sleepy to think about more plotting, more problem-solving. He likes the feel of Gilfoyle’s lips skimming his neck, and the soft bunching of Gilfoyle’s shirt when Dinesh slides his hand up Gilfoyle’s back. He doesn’t want to think about the fact that in all likelihood there will be a next time, because Richard can’t stop fucking shit up, and maybe they should move on, but Dinesh is too mired, and he’s not part-owner and CTO of any other company. And even if Richard is a piece of shit, he does have a good piece of tech in Pied Piper. And if Dinesh left, then Gilfoyle would have to leave, and then they’d both have to find jobs somewhere. And Gilfoyle is an asshole, so it would be pretty hard for him to get hired somewhere, even if his code is absurdly good.

Dinesh drifts off to sleep. In his dreams, he opens the fridge to find Anton perfectly preserved, its GPUs neatly racked on the fridge’s gleaming white shelves. He turns to tell Gilfoyle that they’ve finally solved Anton’s cooling problems, only to realize they’d left him on the road to Stanford, that Gilfoyle had fallen out of the truck and Dinesh is only just now realizing it. He’s so horrified he wakes himself up.

Gilfoyle isn’t usually a cuddler when they’re actually asleep, but this time he’s still clinging to Dinesh, an arm thrown over his stomach and his breath warm against Dinesh’s neck. Dinesh is pretty sure there’s a damp spot on his shoulder under Gilfoyle’s mouth, but he can’t even feel superior about it. He gets a fierce burning in his chest when Gilfoyle curls up on him like this. Cute aggression, he thinks, but he won’t tell Gilfoyle that, because neither one of them will end up looking good. Instead he tightens his arm around Gilfoyle’s waist and nuzzles his face into the top of Gilfoyle’s head, since Gilfoyle isn’t awake to call him on it.

* * *

 

Once they’ve slept, the work starts again. Anton is gone, but they’ve got their funding from Bream-Hall, which mostly means they can start storing data the old-fashioned way again, once they have money for server space. Richard and Dinesh handle the data migration again since it can’t live on the fridges forever, or really at all. Dinesh only wants to hit Gilfoyle for backseat coding a few times, which is pretty impressive, he thinks. Gilfoyle’s supposed to be deleting any trace of their work from the smart fridge network, and Dinesh has to admit despite the occasional distraction that he does a good job. He cleans up, careful as a cat burglar, and satisfies Pied Piper and himself that no one will ever know they were in thousands of kitchens across North America for a week there.

“We should go to Hawaii,” he says to Dinesh the afternoon he finishes, propping his long legs up on the edge of his desk. He has a beer, and he’s been very clear about being done with work for the day. Dinesh is still working, still finding little flaws here and there with how the data was transferred back over, but Gilfoyle is just drinking beer and watching him. It’s distracting, but not in a bad way. He should probably feel worse than he does about how Gilfoyle watches him sometimes, like he’s the wolf and Dinesh the dumb deer who just stands there, chewing grass and fixing empty references. But he doesn’t. It usually leads to good things later, these days.

Richard snorts, not looking up from his computer and therefore not distracted by how Gilfoyle is looking at Dinesh and whatever it means. “You don’t seem like a beach person.”

“No one asked you, dick,” he answers. Dinesh wonders if he can hear that it’s an insult, not a nickname.

“Please don’t call me that,” Richard says, a little nervously, and not really answering Dinesh’s question either way. Gilfoyle doesn’t even look at him. He’s still watching Dinesh, so he takes the excuse to turn away from his screen, rolling back from the table a few inches and giving it some thought.

He’s really not a beach person, but he went to Aruba with his family ten years ago, and he remembers it was warm and happy, and he’ll steer clear of jellyfish this time. Besides, during the whole Keenan ordeal, he’d done some googling, and Hawaii does look awesome as a real place and not just as a metaphor. “I want to do one of those night dives,” he says, because those pictures had been especially awe-inspiring. “With the glowing plankton? That sounds awesome.”

Gilfoyle cocks his head. “You want to go scuba diving at night, surrounded by miles of dark water and sharks?”

That paints a pretty immediate picture, a far cry from the soothing, lava-lamp experience Dinesh had been imagining. “You can do it from a boat, right? Maybe from a boat.” He’d been imagining a drink in his hand anyway. He thinks not so long ago he’d be picturing a girl in a hula skirt tucked under his arm. But Gilfoyle’s intent gaze is making it hard to think of anything except him at Dinesh’s side, his dry voice pointing out the bright swirls of color, and now Dinesh really wants to take this trip.

“I think you’d be good at surfing,” Gilfoyle tells him.

“Really?” Dinesh brightens.

“No. Though watching you fall on your ass over and over would probably be worth it anyway.” Dinesh just smirks, because what Gilfoyle means is he wouldn’t mind watching him in his swim trunks.

“Guys, we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Richard reminds them, cutting in. “Programmers to hire, and office space to rent, and a new business plan to present to Bream-Hall…”

All of which sounds exhausting and unfun, and the opposite of Hawaii, and Richard has already taken Hawaii away from them once. Metaphorically, anyway. “Sounds like a lot of work for a CEO,” Dinesh observes, and Gilfoyle has that little smile on his face, proud the way he always is when Dinesh goes on the offensive.

“Plus, isn’t Hawaii kind of expensive? Airfare alone…” Richard shakes his head, making a whistling sound.

Gilfoyle crosses his arms, finally looking Richard’s way, and the smile is nowhere to be seen now. “Gotta spend our bonuses somehow.”

“Well,” Richard says, and Dinesh jerks his head around again. Even Jared is looking wary, and Dinesh is glad that pedestal is at least a little lower than it was. “I was thinking, we’ll really have more runway to get to series B if we minimize any salary compensation.”

_Fuck that,_ Dinesh thinks, and hears the words echoed out loud in Gilfoyle’s voice.

“I was thinking,” Dinesh says hotly, “that you nearly ran this whole company off the rails because of _Poop Faire_ , and maybe the least you can do is pay your team for giving them all heart attacks.”

“That’s not —” Richard looks to Jared for assurance but finds only sad agreement on his face. “Guys. I’m trying to play it safe. I know what I did, and I’m really sorry, but that’s all the more reason to be cautious in this next round.”

“This is cautious,” Gilfoyle retorts. “Because if I don’t take a break, I might end up suffocating you in your sleep one night. You know. By accident.” He doesn’t look like he would feel very sorry about the accident.

“I think a break is a good idea,” Jared breaks in. “As is compensation. We have some down time now as we reset. We should take advantage of it.

“Fine,” Richard snaps, seeing he has no backup. “Fine. I’ll negotiate the contract with Bream-Hall, and you guys enjoy Hawaii.”

“We will,” Dinesh says, and Gilfoyle actually gives him a fist bump on his way into the kitchen.

* * *

 

And that’s how, a month later, Gilfoyle finds himself with Dinesh drooling on his shoulder as Honolulu comes into view below them. He’s been asleep for hours, even after fighting Gilfoyle for the window seat, so Gilfoyle shrugs his shoulder, jostling him uncomfortably. Dinesh wakes up with a pitiful sound, but he perks up when he sees they’re landing.

“This is amazing,” Dinesh says for the eighth time before they’ve even the airport. He’s not wrong. They keep turning corners and finding themselves outside, the air perfect, and Gilfoyle can feel his shoulders unbunching from the hours in the plane, the weeks before that of hunching over his computer, of hauling around server components. He takes a deep breath and focuses on the here and now.

They’re not even staying, and after just enough time to sit and drink a beer in one of the overpriced airport bars, they’re getting on another plane. This one is substantially smaller, and it’s only a short hop before they’re deplaning, this time in Maui.

They get dinner at a little place not far from their Airbnb, and return to sit on the lanai in the deepening evening, watching the waves roll in down on the beach. “This was a good idea,” Dinesh says, and Gilfoyle just smirks.

“I know.”

They rent gear and go snorkeling, and Dinesh only mocks him a little about the special mask Gilfoyle has to wear if he wants to actually see any of the fish without his glasses. Dinesh looks just as stupid in his flippers and mask, but Gilfoyle feels more naked without his glasses than his clothes. It’s not his looks he’s worried about, like Dinesh fussing over his swim trunks. It’s that he’s blind and now he’s wearing flippers, and waddling across the rocks is the least graceful he’s felt in a long time. He relaxes once they’re both in the water, relieved when the world slides back into focus around him.

Apparently Dinesh has done this before, on a trip with his family when he was fifteen. He’s not skilled, but he takes to it more easily than Gilfoyle, which is annoying. But the feeling ebbs as he watches Dinesh paddling in circles, keeping a cautious but avid interest in the sea turtles that have drifted close to investigate them both.

They float around for an hour or more, until Gilfoyle points out the eel lurking near the bottom of their little cove, making Dinesh follow his gaze. Dinesh promptly decides they should take a lunch break. Dinesh hauls himself up on the rock outcropping they’re all using to jump in and out of the reef area. When he takes off his mask his hair sticks up, dark and wet, and he smiles at Gilfoyle as he smooths it back and kicks off his flippers, more beautiful in his graceless barefooted hop than any dance move or sexcapade Gilfoyle has ever seen him attempt. Gilfoyle watches him from the bobbing waves and feels a surge of affection so strong it almost feels like anger. It mostly passes while he’s floundering to shore, but the dregs of it remain, lapping at him soft and constant like the waves.

They bought sandwiches at the coffee shop they’d stopped at that morning, and they eat them sitting on their towels in the sand. It’s crowded here, but not too badly, and not in the way that California beaches get. It’s the same ocean, blue and endless, but it’s not. When Gilfoyle kisses him, right out in the open, because Dinesh’s hair is still wet and spikey and he wants to, Dinesh kisses him back. He draws back after a moment, ducking his head in embarrassment, and takes another bite of his sandwich to cover his retreat. But he doesn’t reprimand him, which is a change from California. That feeling that isn’t anger surges up in Gilfoyle again, and this time it stays riding high in his chest for the rest of the day.

* * *

 

 

Dinesh wakes him up in the morning with a lazy grope, and there are worse ways to meet the day. He’s not even sure Dinesh is completely awake at first, but the hand petting gently at his cock isn’t unwelcome. Dinesh is pressed loosely against his back, and Gilfoyle can feel him stiff against Gilfoyle’s thigh, rubbing just below his ass. It feels good, but not good enough that Gilfoyle wants to do anything but lay there and let it continue to happen, almost drowsing still.

He knows Dinesh is awake when he starts mouthing wet shapes into the side of Gilfoyle’s neck. He’s not leaving marks, just tasting him, though Gilfoyle doesn’t think anyone tastes particularly great first thing in the morning, even if they’re facing the wrong way for morning breath to be a factor. Dinesh’s hand is moving more purposefully now, as Gilfoyle’s dick hardens under the attention, but he doesn’t move except to press his face deeper into the pillow, the better to allow access to his throat.

“Wake up so we can screw around,” Dinesh finally whines in his ear, and Gilfoyle shivers in spite of himself when Dinesh’s lips brush against his ear, a full-body shudder that lights up every pore and muscle, and he’s in no way asleep now.

“I’m feeling lazy,” Gilfoyle says anyway, stretching to capture the last tingling feeling, and catching his breath when Dinesh’s hand slides along his full length. “You go ahead.”

Dinesh makes an annoyed sound, so Gilfoyle hooks his leg back, dragging Dinesh’s leg over his until his cock is pressed firmly against Gilfoyle’s ass. He runs a hand through the hair of Dinesh’s thigh, now wrapped around him. “Do your thing,” he murmurs, and Dinesh suddenly gets the picture. He goes to work, and Gilfoyle closes his eyes and does nothing except pant and dig his fingers into Dinesh’s thigh and eventually come like a fire hose. Vacation sex is not overrated.

It isn’t until they’re done that Dinesh realizes they’d left the window open the previous night, all their cries and sounds of pleasure drifting out to the garden below. He freaks out about it for the length of time it takes him to shower, talking ostensibly to Gilfoyle but mostly to himself over the running water. But by the time he’s finished, he’s talked himself around to being too hungry to skip breakfast just to avoid their fellow travelers.

They serve themselves fruit and bread and coffee on the big lanai with the same German couple and Australian family they met yesterday, and no one so much as looks at them strangely. Instead, they merely trade recommendations for restaurants and snorkeling sites before heading to the beach, losing themselves in brightly colored fish and sea turtles again.

* * *

 

“I thought you’d be more self-conscious,” Gilfoyle tells him that afternoon. Dinesh had made a brief attempt to close the window shutters this time before giving up and tackling Gilfoyle to the bed, heedless of the sand still clinging to their legs. They’ve just come back from the beach with towels wrapped around their waists like saris and flip-flops on their feet. Dinesh yanks at the towel underneath Gilfoyle, spreading it wider in a last-minute effort to save the bedclothes. “I was kind of looking forward to teasing you about it.”

Dinesh lets out a skeptical sound, settling down on top of him. His elbows are splayed out to either side of Gilfoyle’s head, their sandy legs tangling together. “It’s hard to be self-conscious when you’re staring at me like I’m a freaking porn star every time I climb out of the water.”

Gilfoyle doesn’t blush as a rule. But he doesn’t have a comeback either, which is an even worse tell, and he doesn’t cover with any obvious distraction, even though he’s got his hands on Dinesh’s ass already. “You think I’m hot,” Dinesh accuses, but he’s smiling too much to make it sound like a threat.

“No shit,” Gilfoyle shoots back, hard-pressed to keep from smiling himself. He thinks he might even be growing used to the warm feeling in his chest, which only grows when faced with Dinesh’s wide smile and eager hands. He slides his own hand around, finding Dinesh half-hard inside his swim trunks already. “Why did you think I’ve been screwing you?”

“If you look at me like this at work, Richard’s going to have a breakdown.”

“Like I give a shit. But also, you don’t usually walk around half-naked at work, so I think I’ll manage to restrain myself. It’s been working out so far.”

“I didn’t know you had it this bad.” Dinesh is teasing, because that’s what they do. They’d tried, haltingly, being nice after it became clear that the accidental making out, and hand jobs, and blow jobs, and then everything else was going to keep happening. It hadn’t worked. Maybe they’re a little nicer than they were before, but mostly, things are as they’ve always been. Except.

“You should,” Gilfoyle answers, voice soft, and Dinesh flinches, like he usually does, going suddenly still. This is why they don’t change things. Dinesh isn’t good with change. “Fuck,” Gilfoyle mutters, backtracking and trying to school his face into something less revealing. “Sorry. Just go back to sexually confident Dinesh. It was really working for me.”

“No,” Dinesh says, looking back up and meeting his gaze. He jerks it away again after a second, but his fingers start moving again, brushing gently over Gilfoyle’s collarbones and the bumps of his shoulders, watching the patterns he draws intently. “You can say it. I like hearing it.”

Gilfoyle eyes him, drawing one foot, rough with sand, up the back of Dinesh’s calf thoughtfully. “No, you don’t,” he observes slowly.

Dinesh squirms a little, because he doesn’t, but, “I want to,” he says. And that’s a lot more than it once was, and it’s enough for Gilfoyle.

He raises himself up, closing his lips on the skin just behind Dinesh’s jaw, and tongues over the soft curve of his ear. “Compared to the rest of the valley, I don’t even hate your code.”

Dinesh’s cock jumps in Gilfoyle’s hand, still wrapped loosely around him, and he pulls back sharply. “That was your tongue in my ear,” he says immediately, and Gilfoyle laughs low, his hands warm on Dinesh’s back, pulling him down.

“No it wasn’t,” he says, and Dinesh doesn’t argue back.


	2. Chapter 2

Coming back to reality should be hard, but instead it’s like they’ve broken through some kind of barrier. Before, they were a struggling start-up. Before, they were beholden to Richard and his brain child. Before, they were just two members of a team, and clearly not its most important ones. Before, they were a Magikarp flopping around, and now they’re a freaking Gyarados.

They come back from Hawaii as an unquestionable set, a pair: Dinesh and Gilfoyle. A couple, Gilfoyle concedes, not even grudgingly. And one more than the sum of its parts. Teaming up against Richard had been a worthy endeavor almost from the start. But Richard still has shit on his face from the Melchor debacle, and the last-minute save wasn’t even his doing. It leaves Dinesh and Gilfoyle with newfound power in the company and especially in the house — as well as with the surge of funding now at Pied Piper’s disposal.

So coming back from Hawaii is a good thing. They have power. They have money. They have a real company they can be proud of.

Then Richard walks them into the sterile wasteland that is his first pick of office space. Gilfoyle figures Dinesh’s temper tantrum sums it up pretty well.

“I can’t go back to that,” Dinesh is saying while Gilfoyle shepherds him toward natural light again. “Not after Hawaii. Maybe we can work from Hawaii. We could rent a house there and work remotely. That’s something a CTO can do, right?”

“Probably not until the company is actually up and running,” Gilfoyle says, though he’s not opposed in the long term. He presses a hand between Dinesh’s shoulder blades, which are still tight and unyielding under his touch, and turns him down the block. He’d seen a bubble tea place on their way in, and Dinesh’s moods are nothing if not persuadable with tapioca pearls and weird flavor combinations.

“We never made our escape plans,” Dinesh points out. “For the next time Richard goes crazy and destroys everything. Like maybe he’s doing right now.”

“We move to Iceland and start mining crypto,” Gilfoyle spitballs.

Dinesh looks at him with disgust, and for a minute Gilfoyle is worried that Dinesh has a previously unexpressed hatred of cryptocurrency that is about to end their relationship where it stands. Some things are just dealbreakers.

“It’s dark there for three months in a row,” Dinesh says, and Gilfoyle relaxes. “I would be one of those people who goes crazy and dismembers everyone in my town with a shovel.”

“Setting your people back at least a decade,” Gilfoyle deadpans, but Dinesh ignores this.

“I could just get a job. Running a company is stressful. There have to be places out there with a better package than Pied Piper. There are developers out there who actually get paid a decent compensation for their work. It doesn’t have to be this complicated!”

“I refuse to work for The Man,” Gilfoyle reminds him, and Dinesh shrugs. Gilfoyle’s hand drops away from his back, and Dinesh surprises him slightly by pulling them back together with a hand loose around his waist.

“So you could mine crypto in the garage like the rest of the Valley. Or grow pot. Ooh, bubble tea!” He pulls away from Gilfoyle to dart in and grab the door, and Gilfoyle follows him in. He orders a taro tea. It’s been growing on him.

* * *

 

Once the offices are shaken out, Richard throws the hiring process their way. Dinesh and Gilfoyle have an entire team to build from the ground up, and there are actually people who want to work for them. It’s pretty unnerving, is what Gilfoyle thinks. Sure, he’s down with the fancy coffee maker and the enormous monitors and all the hardware he can ask for, but hiring staff is not a thing he has ever aspired to. They’ve hired a few people in the past, but they worked out of the house and came by way of recommendation, not resume submission. This time, they have a link on their website. It freaks Gilfoyle out, how corporate it feels.

Dinesh seems less ill-at-ease. “We’ll have minions,” he says, almost awed, and, Gilfoyle acknowledges, point.

“Oh, please don’t,” Jared says, leaning over the conference table where they’re seated. “I would really like this relaunch to be about building a positive work environment. We can start fresh, with all positive energy.” He looks a bit haunted, the cheerfulness tinged by mania, and Gilfoyle considers really digging the knife in by questioning just who it was in the company who sent them on their most recent downward spiral. But he doesn’t. He kind of respects Jared these days. He was the first one to walk away, which was more spine than Gilfoyle had thought him capable of. He sticks to the present.

“How about code slaves?” he asks, and Jared smiles bracingly.

“Of course you two can joke among yourselves all you like. Just, once we have other employees, remember you’re the CTOs. You have to provide an example to the others!” He looks over his shoulder where a Fed Ex man has just appeared with a stack of boxes that Gilfoyle really hopes are the new projectors. Yeah, they’ll be helpful once they have a staff, but until then he’s going to enjoy kicking Dinesh’s ass at Mario Kart on a screen as tall as he is.

He looks back over at Dinesh once Jared has left the room. “He can’t have thought this through,” Gilfoyle says doubtfully.

“There’s no way. I mean, obviously I would be a great role model for junior developers, but you’re high at work most days.”

“And yet I still churn out better code than you at your best, so maybe they’ll learn how not to be an uptight asshole.” He rolls his chair over and takes the stack of resumes out of Dinesh’s hands, scanning through quickly. “Jesus Christ,” he says. “This is the best we can do?”

Jared appears again, leaning in to peer over his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“Trash,” Gilfoyle declares, dropped one resume on the floor. Another immediately follows it. “Worse than trash.” Jared scrambles to pick them up. “Barely acceptable,” Gilfoyle admits, pausing over the next file in his hands.

Dinesh pulls down the top of the paper, craning his head to read the name, and then starts typing into his laptop. “Well, he definitely looks like a programmer,” he says skeptically.

“I don’t think that should be the point of googling them,” Jared says. “In fact, there are some pretty clear laws about what criteria we can use to determine their eligibility as employees.”

“This one might work.” Gilfoyle passes another sheet to Dinesh, who immediately starts typing again.

“Wow. She’s hot.”

“Okay,” Jared says. “That’s really not —”

“Jared,” Gilfoyle snaps. He looks pointedly at the door, and Jared hesitates, but leaves them to it.

They google a few more candidates, but that gets boring fast. At the end of the first afternoon, they’ve thrown the entire stack on the floor and told Jared that none of them are workable. Then they go back to arranging their workstations and exploring the kitchen. The boxes were indeed the new projectors, and the image is fucking crisp, which makes every blue shell that much more satisfying. Dinesh tells him he’s thinking about buying a Tesla, which hurts Giloyle’s soul it’s so stupid. There was a time he would have let him make an idiot of himself, but Gilfoyle finds those days are mostly in the past, at least on the bigger things.

“You forget I’ve seen your dick in intimate detail. Buying a fancy car isn’t going to change its size.”

“Fuck you, you were happy enough with the size of my dick last night. Besides, we just blew a wad of cash on Hawaii. This is the same thing.”

“A car is as good as Hawaii?”

“It lasts longer. And it’ll drive itself.”

“If you believe that, you’re stupider than I thought. And even if it does, you’d put your life in the hands of a robotic chauffeur? Do you remember what happened the last time one of us was in a self-driving car?”

Dinesh grumbles, but Gilfoyle sees him close out the tab in his browser.

* * *

 

The next day, Jared sets another package next to Gilfoyle’s desk. Gilfoyle tips it over to check the label. It’s light to be any kind of equipment, but the box itself is large. He wasn’t expecting anything else, but a quick look around reveals the source.

Dinesh is watching him in his own monitor’s reflection, and he turns when he sees Gilfoyle looking. His eyes are wide and innocent, which seals the deal. “Oh, you got a package? What’d you order?”

“Nothing,” Gilfoyle says, eyes narrowed. He rips the tape off the box and opens it up, and he just stares for a minute. Then he puts the box down.

“What’d you get?” Dinesh presses, and just for that, Gilfoyle lets him stew over it.

“Wrong address,” is all he says, and he doesn’t look back, even when Dinesh gets up to walk by, conveniently passing by close enough to look into the box and check for himself. He stomps off to the break area, and Gilfoyle can hear him snapping at Richard for hogging the toaster.

He comes back with his head down, and it’s not until lunch that he stops by Gilfoyle’s desk again and notices the addition. He puts his hands on his hips. “You jerk,” he says. The stuffed goat is perched just to the side of Gilfoyle’s monitor, where it can watch him work with its glassy goat eyes. “I thought you didn’t like it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gilfoyle says, not looking away from his monitor. He loves it. It’s fucking adorable. He’s already named it Baphomet.

Jared brings them another stack of resumes the next day, and these get dicks drawn on most of them, and then they throw them on the floor. After the third day, Jared insists they take a second look, after he goes through with a pair of scissors and removes the names from all of the resumes. In a few cases, he needs to reprint them, because the doodles themselves contain identifying information.

Gilfoyle would rather be coding than dealing with any of this, but the truth is that their workload and timeline are uncomfortable reminders that they do need to hire more staff, and coding just makes it clear how much the two of them aren’t sufficient. It’s not that Gilfoyle doesn’t want the help if they could find someone, but he can’t stand the idea of spending his time fixing other people’s junk code, which is all he foresees from the stack of resumes he’s seen so far.

“They could take a test,” Dinesh says idly, and Gilfoyle finds himself typing out exercises he might actually find entertaining to score. Dinesh reads over his shoulder and offers his own ideas, and Gilfoyle even takes a few of them. They do need more front-end people. They’re sure as hell not making Pied Piper ready for the public in this century if it’s just Dinesh on the job.

It takes another week before Gilfoyle is pleased with their test. Jared says they have to give the potential hires at least 24 hours to respond, even though Gilfoyle could complete the test in less than 12 hours, and considers anything longer than that basically a no-go anyway. Jared prevails though, and Gilfoyle has to admit that a few of the resumes he’d previously tossed on the ground stand out a little more after they’ve passed the practical test.

Richard puts up a fuss about the second test, until Gilfoyle stares him down. “You told us to hire people. Do you want some asshole who took one online course in C# and thinks he’s hot shit, or do you want someone who can actually build your internet?”

“Can you just get them in here before the end of the month?” Richard pleads, and Gilfoyle turns back to his desk.

“Sure thing, dick.”

Gilfoyle gets his second test, and then Dinesh has his ideas for a third, and it’s only fair at this point to indulge his partner’s demands. They want highly qualified candidates after all.

But almost as soon as the stallions are installed at their workstations, Richard goes and hires fifty more people, diluting the stallions to homeopathic levels, and Gilfoyle really isn’t sure why he tries anymore.

* * *

 

Predictably, things quickly go to shit again, but in a less predictable way this time. They all stare at each other on the doorstep of Erlich’s house. Maybe it had been a mistake not to worry about his extended absence sooner. Or maybe not. It was nice while it lasted anyway, and Gilfoyle will have to see how this shakes out before he regrets not wasting any brain space on Erlich. He looks around, trying to ascertain whether Jian Yang had actually dumped all their stuff on the lawn, or just the stuff he hadn’t wanted for himself. He knows which he would have done in Jian Yang’s place.

“I only have the one sofa bed,” Jared says apologetically after Dinesh and Richard have just repeated _what the fuck_ to themselves a half-dozen times or so. “But if you don’t mind sleeping on the floor, you’re all welcome —”

“Fuck no,” Gilfoyle says, over top of Dinesh’s strangled sound of horror.

“We’ll get a hotel,” Dinesh agrees and starts picking through the belongings strewn across the yard.

“We can stay in a hostel for a quarter the price,” Gilfoyle argues immediately, stepping over piles of clothing. In order, he’s looking for: his stash of weed, his wireless headphones, his toothbrush. He doesn’t own things he can’t replace, but those are the things he figures he’ll want in short order. He doesn’t contest the “we” part though.

“If I’m keeping my belongings in a car, then I want my own shower,” Dinesh snaps back. “And maybe access to a sauna.”

Gilfoyle knows he’s already lost this fight. Dinesh is a giant princess, and they have the money. And he could use some creature comforts after getting kicked out of his house, especially because he just found his sturdiest old shoebox, empty, which means Jian Yang definitely jacked his weed. Asshole.

* * *

 

The real fight comes the next day, in the coffee shop around the corner from the hotel. They both have their laptops open, paging through Zillow and Craigslist and Trulia, but Dinesh is mostly backseat driving over Gilfoyle’s shoulder. Gilfoyle can feel himself prickling. He tells himself it’s because Dinesh took first shower and left the floor a sopping mess, but he also knows that’s not why.

“There’s no way a studio will be big enough,” Dinesh says, pushing Gilfoyle’s coffee aside to poke at his screen.

Gilfoyle moves the cup back to his side with a narrow look. “Jian Yang tossed most of my stuff, so yeah, I think it will.” It’s a little closer to the mark to say he’s annoyed that Dinesh ordered coffee for both of them when he’d walked up to the counter. And no, Gilfoyle doesn’t change his order very often, but something about the automatic assumption of it still got to him. Much like the way Dinesh keeps trying to scroll Gilfoyle’s touchpad for him, despite being repeatedly smacked away. Much like the way Dinesh has bitched about Gilfoyle’s search parameters on Zillow without bothering to stop and ask why.

“Well I’ve still got most of my stuff,” Dinesh starts. Then he catches the expression on Gilfoyle’s face, and the penny finally drops. “Wait, what? Are you seriously not planning on splitting a place with me?” And there it is, because the instant indignation is actually why he’s mad, even if he had to instigate it himself.

“In what way are we ready to move in together?” He takes control of his computer once again, paging through another batch of apartment listings instead of confronting Dinesh’s gaping mouth of disbelief.

“We already live together, you jackass! We’ve lived together for two years!”

“Because we happen to work in the same place.”

“Oh, and did your penis just happen to be in my mouth last night?” Dinesh hisses this part, in deference to the other customers in the coffee shop. Gilfoyle just crosses his arms, finally turning to face him.

“You actually want to move in with me?” he challenges. “Because the last I checked, your parents didn’t know about me, and you talk to them just about every day. How are you going to explain that one away?” It’s not exactly the problem that’s eating at him, but it’s not totally off the mark either. And bringing up Dinesh’s family is a pretty easy way to push his buttons, though it only semi-succeeds in this case.

“The same way I have for the last year, asshole. You literally talked to them over my shoulder, and you managed not to fall on my dick while doing it. They already know we live together. Besides, you haven’t told your family about us.”

“I haven’t told my family what country I’m living in,” Gilfoyle retorts. “Your family knows what you had for breakfast.”

Dinesh narrows his eyes suddenly. “This isn’t about my parents. You don’t give a crap about family. What are you actually worried about?”

Gilfoyle bites the inside of his lower lip. Dinesh has gotten a lot better at reading him since they started dating, and he’s not always sure he appreciates it. “I don’t give a crap about my family,” he says, too slowly, and Dinesh’s eyes go soft with realization. Gilfoyle scowls. “Don’t.”

Dinesh does anyway, making the same face he does when he sees an especially good video of a kitten on Reddit. “You care about my family,” he coos, and Gilfoyle just glares at him. “You care about whether my family cares about me.”

“Among other things.” He shoves his laptop shut, because the fact that that’s a realization for Dinesh is actually most of his problem with this arrangement. “What if we break up?”

“What?” Dinesh looks instantly worried. “Why would we do that?”

“Because you hate the way I do laundry. Because I hate the way you hog the bathroom. Because your parents want you to. Because you want to get married and have kids. I don’t fucking know.”

“I do hate the way you do laundry,” Dinesh interrupts him before his eyes go wide. “Holy shit, don’t you think you’re jumping the gun? Also, what the hell? I’m not breaking up with you because my parents tell me to.”

Gilfoyle levels him a look, and Dinesh loses some of his indignation. “Okay, I did do that, but it was in college, and she was not a nice person! They were right!”

“I’m not a nice person,” Gilfoyle points out, and this time Dinesh just looks stubborn.

“Then maybe I have a type. What’s your point?”

“My point is that you haven’t thought about this at all. This isn’t like Erlich’s incubator. This is you and me, moving in together. It’s a decision.” And there, now he’s said it, as plain as he can. But Dinesh’s face doesn’t change and his voice, when he speaks, is just annoyed.

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

Dinesh looks briefly skyward. “Do you want a fucking Prezi demonstration? Should I write you a formal proposal? I love you, you dick, and I want to move in with you for real.”

Gilfoyle wasn’t fishing. He would swear on his own grave. But now that Dinesh has said it, for the first time, he realizes it is what he wanted, and his world tilts and then neatly realigns. He has to work very hard to keep his cool, but he’s had years of practice. His mouth stays perfectly straight. He remembers at the last second not to clear his throat, because it would be a dead giveaway, and has to hope his swallow isn’t as loud as it sounds to him.

“I want a cat,” he says after an acceptably short pause, and Dinesh makes a face and doesn’t call him on it.

“Ew, no. They poop inside, and they lick their butts. We’re not getting a cat.”

* * *

 

Her name is Abaddon, and she’s black except for one white paw, and Dinesh manages to hate her for all of ten minutes before she finds a paper bag, crawls inside, and immediately nets him three hundred likes on Instagram.

Jared has to introduce a rule of a maximum of five minutes at the beginning of stand-up that allows cat pictures, or they don’t make it out for a full hour.

As it is, Gilfoyle makes a chart showing the productivity of the office in number of stories has gone down by a statistically significant amount since Dinesh started corralling the programmers and brandishing cat pictures at them.

“It’s not sexual harassment,” Jared has to explain to him after three weeks of forced Show and Tell. “But it bears remarkable similarities. You can’t enforce a workplace quid pro quo based on who compliments your pet.”

“Anjelie is a great coder,” Dinesh defends hotly. “Just because she also thinks Abaddon is cute —”

“You said, and I quote, ‘This is why you get the best assignments,’” Gilfoyle points out. “After she shared the video with the laser pointer.”

“Fine,” Dinesh grumbles.

Gilfoyle still ends up cleaning the litter boxes and Dinesh still complains about cat hair on his clothes, but it settles down into a pretty good household.

* * *

 

The apartment itself isn’t large, but it has laundry in the unit, and a little balcony where Dinesh imagines drinking coffee but usually doesn’t, and Gilfoyle can smoke when he’s stressed out about work or turmoil in the local anarchist scene.

They’ve been sleeping together more often than not for months now, but it feels different once they don’t have a choice about it. There are spats over who gets to hang what in the bedroom and the common space, especially when they realize the entire apartment is now common space. Or none of it is. It’s confusing. Gilfoyle nearly moves out on Day Two when Dinesh won’t stop hassling him over the boxes they have yet to unpack, not least because he’s tired from being the one to lug most of it up the stairs, thanks to Dinesh prissing out once again.

They make it to the end of the day however, and sink down with cartons of Indian food on the couch. There are still boxes, though less than there might have been without Jian Yang’s halfhearted eviction process. They don’t have dishes yet, because they’d just used Erlich’s the whole time. The couch is from craigslist, and still smells like someone else’s house, but not like cats or cigarettes, so Dinesh let Gilfoyle drag it into the U-Haul rental, and even helped him maneuver it up the stairs. When they look around the space, empty as it is, they find it’s theirs. Their games and movies make a pleasing jumble on the shelf, and they have a coffee maker gleaming new on the counter. They’ll probably still go out for coffee, but it gives the place a homey air nonetheless.

Dinesh has the bed already made up, and they unmake it with gusto. Dinesh tries to push Gilfoyle out of the bed afterward in order to change the sheets, but Gilfoyle plays dead. He lets himself be pushed sideways just far enough that Dinesh can cuddle up to him without having to touch the wet spot, and they call it a truce.

Dinesh changes the sheets in the morning when Gilfoyle gets up to take a shower, and he figures he can live with that. He puts the coffee on while Dinesh takes his own shower. They drive into work together, and join the fray of programmers again.

* * *

 

It turns out none of them know how to run a stand-up meeting. They’ve only had employees for brief stretches of time, and never anywhere near this many. Richard had started running them, but once he makes it past the vomiting stage it simply turns into him coding on the whiteboard by himself in front of the whole company until lunchtime, and still no one knows what they’re supposed to be working on.

Dinesh and Gilfoyle are tasked with taking over. They’re the CTOs, and nominally in charge of this stuff anyway. It takes a few more weeks to hammer out anything that works. Dinesh makes a PowerPoint presentation that lasts for nearly an hour and looks like he’s trying to explain Pied Piper to people who might need to recreate it from Stone Age technology. Gilfoyle tends to err on the side of asking if anyone doesn’t know what they’re doing, which no one is willing to admit to, and then letting them go.

Finally Jared comes up with a rubric for stand-ups, and Gilfoyle takes over. Things improve marginally.

“Can we do Good Cop/Bad Cop?” Dinesh asks him when they realize a few of the programmers are still falling behind. Gilfoyle thinks it over and nods. He’s always up for scaring the shit out of someone.

He starts dropping by the slower coders’ stations. “You’re late,” he says to Amy. “You’ve only gotten through two stories this week.” He takes a closer look. “Wait, what the fuck are you doing? No wonder you’re slow. Move.” He pushes Amy out of her chair and sits in her place. “You don’t need half this shit.” He deletes it with two clicks and types in a line of pseudo code in its place. “We just want the new module to play nice with the idiotic iPhone 10 update. You don’t need to redesign the whole fucking app.” He leaves her to polish it into something workable, and sure enough, she’s onto a new story before the afternoon is out.

Jared brings them into the conference room three weeks in. “As I warned you, I conducted an anonymous survey of our programmers, just to see how our new operations and management are shaking out. The responses were mixed, but there were some unified comments. One was a family dynamic.” Jared looks at them both earnestly. “I want you to know that I have always wanted to foster an organic family-feeling company, so yay, you two!” Dinesh turns his head, and Gilfoyle shrugs at him. “Though in this particular case, multiple employees called out a ‘Code mom’ and ‘Code dad’ arrangement.”

Dinesh smirks. “That was on purpose,” he brags. “We were calling it Good Cop/Bad Cop, but I can see how it evolved.”

“Well, it’s half working.” Jared smiles encouragingly. “Employees are really responding to the constructive feedback they’re getting. But some of it’s coming across as antagonistic, and I’m not sure it’s really productive.”

Dinesh laughs. “Sorry, Gilfoyle. Maybe you should find a cave to hide in.”

Jared frowns. “I’m sorry. No, Gilfoyle’s feedback is highly rated. Dinesh, you’re coming off as moderately to extremely overbearing.”

Gilfoyle hasn’t laughed that hard in a long time. He stops laughing when Jared adds “supervisor” to his title. Within another week, he’s realized he can simply talk to Danny for ten minutes a day, and then barely talk to anyone else at all, so he does that. Things start looking up.

* * *

 

“What are you doing?” Dinesh asks, standing stock still in the hall of the apartment. Gilfoyle doesn’t look down.

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like you’re doing pull-ups,” Dinesh says, and even if he’s not looking, Gilfoyle can tell he’s being stared at.

“Then take an educated guess.” The last word comes out in a bit of a grunt, because he was trying not to lose his rhythm.

“How many of those can you do?”

“I don’t know. I usually do twenty-five.”

“I genuinely thought you would die by the age of thirty. This resets my entire worldview.”

Gilfoyle lets go of the bar stretching across the doorway and drops to the ground, shrugging. “Sorry. You don’t get all my stuff in a few years.”

“No, but… seriously.” Dinesh looks confused. “You work out?”

“You have seen me naked almost every night for the past year,” Gilfoyle points out. “Did you think I got there by my typing skills?”

“No, you’re just strong,” Dinesh says. “You lift boxes and punch holes in walls.” Gilfoyle stops for a moment, assessing. He knows what he’s good at (coding, Call of Duty, hardware, ice hockey), and he knows what he’s merely competent at. So it’s really Dinesh who’s misinformed here, but it doesn’t stop a rush of flattered satisfaction from welling up through his chest.

“I can do that because I do pull-ups,” he points out without flickering an eyelid. “They are related.”

“I can’t do a pull-up,” Dinesh says.

“Probably not,” Gilfoyle agrees, because he’s seen Dinesh’s daily routine, and nothing approaching exercise is on the list. “It took me a while.”

Dinesh eyes the bar doubtfully. “I don’t want to die by the time I’m thirty either,” he says, and Gilfoyle sighs. He’d been told by plenty of people that he engaged in unhealthy relationships. Time to prove them wrong.

“Okay. Start with negatives.”

* * *

 

He finds a way around the fifty other programmers by asking Dinesh to help him check the server load one day, and using it to put his hand over Dinesh’s mouth and see how red he turns getting off half on Gilfoyle’s hand on his dick and half on the idea of their entire company just on the other side of the door. But he doesn’t tell Gilfoyle to stop, and when Gilfoyle makes another excuse for them to end up in the same closet a week later, Dinesh almost gives the whole game up just from the look on his face.

Gilfoyle considers himself a minimalist. A minimalist who enjoys his video games and beer and other non-essentials, but a minimalist nonetheless. He doesn’t need much in terms of creature comforts, and he doesn’t have much in the way of possessions that he couldn’t leave at a moment’s notice.

But sharing an apartment with Dinesh feels more his than anything in a long time. He’d taken pride in living his best life even when he was sharing a house with five other men, but he can’t deny there’s something nice about having a whole place to call his own. Dinesh is the only person he shares it with, and Dinesh never has work meetings in the kitchen, or has strange women out in the yard, or yells in German from the next room. Gilfoyle has a cat, and a roommate he can kiss just because he’s in front of the coffee. And it’s nice to come home and not see a sign of work.

Not that they don’t end up on the couch with their laptops at least a few nights a week, arguing over something the coders have done. But it’s surprisingly cool, having a workplace to do work, and a commute to buffer it from their home life. Gilfoyle almost has a panic attack the day that he finds himself texting Dinesh that they’re out of milk, horrified at how domestic he’s become in such a short time.

He checks the go-bag he keeps in the closet in case of nuclear attack or zombie outbreak or a solar event that kills the electric grid and destroys civilization as they know it. He’s still ready. Then he plays Napalm Death at top volume over Dinesh’s protests until he flees the house, stomping out to the coffee house down the street. Gilfoyle feels good about it for a few hours: his free reign of the house, his refusal to moderate for anyone. Then he just feels kind of lonely and bored, and he ends up undoing all of it by texting an apology to Dinesh and promising to let him pick out any game to play, even if it’s the stupid cat VR game again.

And in the meantime, he may as well enjoy this home life, just like he enjoys his beer and his video games and his running water. None of it will last forever.


	3. Chapter 3

He pitches the idea of the cryptocurrency to Richard after a leadership team meeting one day.

“Don’t let him show you his PowerPoint,” Dinesh hisses his way out, and Richard just laughs until he sees the serious look on Gilfoyle’s face.

“What, you actually have a slideshow prepared?”

He does, and it only takes him a moment to pull it up.

But they’re pretty desperate, and Richard is more and more caving to his more willful side, so it doesn’t take too much convincing.

It turns out that, much like stand-up meetings, none of them know how to make a public offering either. But much to their surprise, Monica does, and is intrigued enough to let Richard pitch her the idea. Gilfoyle doesn’t think the meeting goes particularly well, but then Laurie tries to join forces with an AI company that scares Gilfoyle and put in place an ad plan that scares Richard, which displeases Jared in turn. She’s always sort of scared Dinesh. More to the point, she finally pisses Monica off enough to jump ship, and just like that they have a new CFO who doesn’t make Richard crazy.

Gilfoyle thinks things have rarely looked better, and he’s not even upset about it. It turns out he can enjoy success as well as chaos, provided he’s benefiting from said success. They have a company under their own control, and a chance to make a new internet and cryptocurrency, which is as close as Gilfoyle gets to making the world a better place. Plus there’s Dinesh, and Gilfoyle knows he’s getting soft, but he likes this feeling. It might be pheromones or a deep-seated social programming toward monogamy that he hadn’t managed to escape, but it is intoxicating.

He even likes Monica, who’s sharp and can get Richard to behave like a human being, and who makes his job easier. Plus there’s a smokers code of brotherhood you have to live by in the Valley.

Dinesh is less pleased with the development. “What?” Gilfoyle asks, confused at first. “She’s good at what she does. Don’t act like Erlich did about Jared. You’re not being replaced. She’s fulfilling a role none of us wants or is any good at.”

“She’s just around a lot, all of a sudden.”

“There’s a lot of people around these days,” Gilfoyle points out, but Dinesh just turns back to his computer. Gilfoyle shrugs and does the same.

* * *

 

Dinesh stops by Gilfoyle’s desk on his way back from the kitchen, dropping off his coffee mug for the day. “You want a ride home?” They don’t exactly carpool, and they don’t exactly not. They catch rides when they happen to synch up, and leave their vehicles wherever it’s most convenient.

“Can’t. I’m working late.”

“That makes sense, since you didn’t show up this morning until 11am,” Dinesh agrees. It bothers him, more than he likes to admit, when he gets home and can’t even enjoy having the house to himself. It was an almost unheard-of luxury back when they lived at Erlich’s, but now he finds what he really wants is for Gilfoyle to come home so they can play videogames or make out. To that end, he occasionally wishes Gilfoyle kept a more normal sleep schedule.

“I’ve got a meeting with Monica,” Gilfoyle adds, without looking away from his computer.

“Okay,” Dinesh says. They’ve had a few late meetings lately, and there’s no reason he should be suspicious, except that he doesn’t actually think Gilfoyle or Monica are especially trustworthy people in general, and Monica is hot, and Gilfoyle is hot, and Dinesh is paranoid. But he’s got just enough perspective to know he’ll get his ass kicked if he says anything based only on the crawling feeling he gets when he thinks about the two of them, heads bent together in a darkened office setting. “Well, have fun.”

When Gilfoyle comes back, it’s late and he smells like cigarettes and beer. “Some meeting,” Dinesh comments, and Gilfoyle only grunts in agreement, shucking off his pants and wandering into the bathroom, turning on the light and momentarily blinding Dinesh. “Get a lot of work done?”

“I guess.”

“What were you working on?”

“It turns out I know a lot more about crypto than Monica does. Conversely, she knows a lot more about business plans than I do.” Gilfoyle reappears with a toothbrush in his mouth. “Why are you being weird?”

“I’m not,” Dinesh says, and Gilfoyle stares at him and brushes his teeth, which is actually weird. He’s the weird one. Gilfoyle turns and heads back into the bathroom, and there’s the sound of running water. Dinesh lays on his back and studies the cracks in the ceiling and tells himself not to make this a thing. That Gilfoyle has always enjoyed a beer and a cigarette while working on projects, regardless of company. Then he argues that Gilfoyle also hasn’t historically been tied to the idea of monogamy. That Monica doesn’t particular give a shit what other people think. That Gilfoyle definitely doesn’t. That Monica can offer Gilfoyle things Dinesh can’t, whether that’s boobs or sex without the complications of a relationship, or just the appeal of not being Dinesh.

“Do you like her?” Dinesh bursts out once Gilfoyle settles next to him and turns the lights off.

“Congratulations. You held off a full ten minutes longer than I thought you would.”

“Do you?”

“I think she is competent at her job, and probably going to save us from Richard so yeah, I’m inclined to feel positively about her. Does that answer your question?”

“No.” He rolls over. “Do you think she’s hot?”

Gilfoyle blinks at him in the dim light trickling through the blinds from the lights outside. “If I say no, you’re going to argue with me. If I say yes, you’re going to get mad. I’m already very bored with this line of inquiry.”

“That’s not an answer,” Dinesh insists.

“Too bad,” Gilfoyle says and rolls over, his back to Dinesh.

* * *

 

Dinesh is gone by the time Gilfoyle gets up the next morning. That isn’t unusual, but it rubs him the wrong way after how they went to bed. Still, he showers and dresses like normal. When he gets to the office, Dinesh just looks at him like a kicked puppy. Which is fucking ridiculous, because Gilfoyle isn’t doing anything, and he’ll take it on the chin for the shit he does do, but this particular emotional blackmail is bullshit. He’s got nothing to apologize for.

Dinesh keeps looking like the world’s saddest programmer, and by mid-afternoon, Gilfoyle needs a break. He escapes to the roof.

He’s not alone there, and he almost turns around and leaves, until he remembers he hasn’t done anything wrong. So instead he approaches the figure standing by the roof’s edge and asks her for a cigarette. Monica hands it over, offering her lighter as well. He doesn’t have — doesn’t want — a lot of people to share his confidences, but he finds he’s gotten uncomfortably reliant on Dinesh. Which is a problem if Dinesh is what he needs to discuss.

“I like you,” he says, and she looks over, briefly alarmed. Every fucking person. “As a co-worker,” he clarifies.

“Uh, cool?”

“I’m not hitting on you.”

She narrows her eyes. “I didn’t think you were.” But her voice is suspicious, and Gilfoyle knows he’s got limited time before she loses patience and goes back inside.

He takes a drag of his cigarette and thinks about stopping there, but what the fuck. Shame is for lesser beings. “Dinesh thinks I was.”

She blows out a breath of smoke, and leans against the HVAC outpost. “Are you warning me off? Asking for advice? I’m really not sure here.”

Gilfoyle grimaces. “I don’t know. Fuck. Sorry.” He goes to grind out his butt, and she waves her hand, stopping him.

“No, I just… I don’t know. You can’t fix insecurity. Or hell, I don’t know. Maybe you can, I just hate dealing with it and usually run away first. I’m guessing that’s not an option?” Gilfoyle shrugs. He guesses it’s theoretically on the table, but he knows it won’t be his play. He’s in too deep. “You could try talking to him?”

“It hasn’t gone well so far.”

“Yeah. I don’t know. It doesn’t work for me either, but it’s what they say you should do.”

She offers him another cigarette, and they smoke in silence until hers is burned down, and she grinds the end under her heel. “Good luck,” she says, before disappearing inside. Gilfoyle nods to himself. Monica’s a pretty good friend.

“Sorry if you wanted to hang out tonight,” Dinesh says, wheeling his chair behind Gilfoyle just after lunch and not sounding sorry at all. “I’m going out with Jeff.”

Gilfoyle shrugs. “Alright.”

* * *

 

They don’t talk about it, at least in any depth. Gilfoyle still shares his smoke breaks with Monica when they happen to cross paths, and Dinesh sets up a regular happy hour with Jeff after work. Afterwards, he regales Gilfoyle with all the inane shit they filled their time with. Gilfoyle is convinced Jeff is the most boring person on the planet, though it’s probably why he’s so good as a stallion. You don’t need personality to code well.

Dinesh’s forced friendship with him is as transparent as it is pathetic. But Gilfoyle doesn’t say anything. If he points it out, Dinesh will just say he’s jealous. It’s the entire reason Dinesh is doing this, and Gilfoyle has zero intentions of delivering for him. And it doesn’t matter. Dinesh will get tired of Jeff eventually. In the meantime, they fall into an uneasy stalemate of shared meals and a shared bed and absolutely no shared feelings about their new friends. It’s fucking great.

* * *

 

The first Gilfoyle hears about the refrigerators he assumes Richard fucked something up, because that’s usually the case. He knows it wasn’t him. He doesn’t fuck around with work on that level. Richard clearly doesn’t believe him, because Richard doesn’t know what a good thing he’s got in Gilfoyle. But Gilfoyle knows it wasn’t him. It couldn’t be.

The fact remains that someone knows. He doesn’t know how to square that. The mime fellatio is too specific, despite his play to Richard that they ignore it. Gilfoyle knows he left the fridges clean. He _knows_ it. He doesn’t know how both of those things can be true.

But _if_ they know. It’s a felony, what he did. He’ll go to jail. He doesn’t trust Richard not to throw him under the bus. He’d do anything to protect Pied Piper, not to mention himself. Gilfoyle can’t really blame him for that. He’s not even sure it’s the wrong call. But that doesn’t mean Gilfoyle is going to dumbly accept his fate. He throws his laptop into his bag and heads toward the car, points it toward Erlich’s house. It can’t hurt to have a look. Maybe it was Jian Yang. The fucker clearly has it out for them. Plus, the timing sort of works out.

He parks out front, walks up the familiar drive, and hammers on the front door.

“Go away!” Jian Yang yells through the door, after a moment’s pause. Gilfoyle imagines him pressed up against the peephole, and glares at the tiny bubble of glass. “This is my house now!”

“Let me in, or I’ll burn your house to the ground.” He holds his lighter up for added incentive. He doesn’t have much in the way of accelerant, but he’s sure he could come up with something. He’s also pretty sure he could jimmy open the window into his room, since he’d intentionally removed the latch when he was living there. It always pays to have an escape route.

But the lock snicks open after a moment. Gilfoyle pushes inside before Jian Yang can change his mind. “What did you tell Seppen?” he demands, using all the extra height be can. Physical intimidation is for the weak-minded, but it can work.

“Who is Seppen?” Jian Yang asks. “And what are you doing here?”

“You told them about the fridge because I complained about you turning the house into a Chinese boarding facility?”

“What fridge? You complain about everything. You are racist, and a witch. I don’t want you in my house.” Despite threats of bodily harm, Jian Yang really doesn’t appear to know anything about the fridge. Gilfoyle believes him. If only because he doubts Jian Yang has any reason to lie. He already knows about the mime. He already hates them, and maybe Gilfoyle in particular. Why not just admit what he did? But he seems genuinely confused by Gilfoyle’s line of questioning.

“I need to see the fridge,” Gilfoyle says, once he’s convinced himself Jian Yang isn’t the rat.

“You are obsessed with the fridge,” Jian Yang complains, following him into the kitchen. “It’s a good fridge. You are paranoid.”

Gilfoyle pries off the front panel and Jian Yang throws up his hands and leaves the room. If Gilfoyle didn’t leave anything on the fridge, maybe he can still find out who’s been snooping around. Whether someone has. He still doesn’t think there’s been a hard hack, but he should be able to prove that. No one is perfect.

At eight o’clock, Dinesh starts messaging him. Gilfoyle ignores it, irritated at the distraction. By ten, Dinesh has resorted to actual phone calls, and Gilfoyle turns his phone off entirely when Jared’s number shows up on his screen. He’s busy.

The thing is, he’s been through his code a hundred times at this point. He’s been through the fridge’s code. There’s nothing there. There’s no way they found him. He’s clean, and he’s been clean for weeks, and there’s no reason they should have waited so long if they had found it during the few days the fridge network was compromised.

Around 1am, he stops long enough to realize how many missed messages he has from Dinesh, and feels a pang. Anyway, he wants someone to talk this through with. He calls him, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and a cigarette in hand.

“Where the hell are you?” Dinesh demands.

Gilfoyle blinks, remembering only now that he and Dinesh are both still kind of pissed off at each other about Monica. “At the house.”

“No, you’re not,” Dinesh says instantly. “Because I’m here, waiting for you. I’ve been waiting for you all night.”

“Not the apartment,” Gilfoyle says, impatient because he doesn’t want to wade back into the Cold War of their argument about who’s actually the shitty boyfriend. He wants to deal with the fucking fridge. “The house. Look, none of this makes any sense.”

“Erlich’s?”

“Fucking Christ. Yes. I’m trying to figure out this fridge mess.”

“At 1am?”

Gilfoyle cracks open another energy drink. “Are you gonna help me or not?”

“It’s late,” Dinesh complains, and Gilfoyle doesn’t flinch, but only because he’s sort of shaking anyway, thanks to nerves and caffeine, the nicotine not balancing him out nearly enough.

“Okay,” he says, and hangs up. He takes another drag on his cigarette, long and deep, and then blows it out. He pushes himself up, and gets back to work.

By the time Jared shows up, Gilfoyle is two coffees and five energy drinks in, the last three of them with logos and names in Chinese he’d filched out of the fridge. They were getting warm anyway. He’s not sure exactly what’s in them, but it’s enough to make his fingers shake. He’s down a half a pack of cigarettes, and really regretting how late he’d stayed up last night. He’s not 22 anymore.

But he’s also had his breakthrough. It’s almost euphoric, in a way, even though it plays to his deepest fears about the coming robot apocalypse. He’d been right: He hadn’t made a mistake. There’s no trace of him anywhere on the fridge. What is there is the spyware, which isn’t contained at all. He knew he hadn’t liked the fridge, nor trusted it, but this is pretty much the worst-case scenario. He’s not surprised, exactly, because he does tend to expect the worst, but it is making him paranoid. No, not paranoid: not since they really are listening. The fridge-servers might only be the tip of the iceberg. He’s sure they’ve talked about drugs in front of the fridge. Had they talked about Dinesh’s fuck-up with Piper Chat? Had they talked about Mia? There’s a lot of exposure.

So he gets his moment to revel in being right, but he’s also deep in escape mode. He has tonight, probably, to figure this shit out, but if he can’t get a handle on it, he knows where he keeps his go bag. He has half a tank of gas, and his crypto stashed on thumb drives, as well as some ready cash. It won’t last as long if he has to cover two people, but Dinesh might not come anyway, and Gilfoyle doesn’t let himself hesitate over that possibility. He just digs the tip of his screwdriver into the smoke detector’s plastic, prying it open instead of unscrewing it nicely.

It’s Jared who forces him still for five minutes, pulling the whole story out of him in frustratingly slow dribbles. Gilfoyle’s hands itch the whole time. He could hack their system again, access the recordings from the house. Sure, searching voice is a bitch, but he could jury rig something together from Richard’s old algorithm.

It’s Jared who points out they can turn the recordings back against Seppen.

Gilfoyle can’t think for a minute, whiplashed from going ninety to zero so quickly. He licks his lips. “How?” he asks, and Jared tells him, pointing out that nothing Seppen has on them will withstand the methods they acquired it by in court.

They work on it until the sun rises. Gilfoyle feels himself starting to come down around 5am, looks over and sees Jared still typing intently at his laptop, face cast in its blue light. He doesn’t look like he’s been up all night, shirt still buttoned and neat. The steady tapping of his typing pauses, and Jared hesitates. “It may be none of my business, but why didn’t you call Dinesh to help you?”

“Why isn’t Richard here?” Gilfoyle asks back, less viciously than he could have.

Jared glances at his phone, sitting on the floor next to his knee, and goes back to his laptop. “Touché,” he admits.

* * *

 

By the time they actually sit down with Seppen, Gilfoyle has regained his equilibrium. He’s eager to take down some assholes, sure, but the panic of the night before has abated. The meeting goes well, Richard does nothing of value, and eventually Jared starts babbling about a bread machine. Gilfoyle tunes out.

There’s something still bothering him though, like a popcorn kernel stuck in his tooth. He can’t stop fussing with it. Seppen hadn’t been listening. They could be lying of course, but they seem as dangerous as a pair of sugar gliders, and besides, why bother to lie? The outcome is the same for them regardless. Jared is going to turn this around, because he’s actually good at his job, and Gilfoyle isn’t going to jail, but it still doesn’t add up.

If Seppen hadn’t been listening to all that recorded data, then how did they know? And then Gilfoyle replays what they’d already said: Hooli and Gavin had come to them. They really hadn’t known, despite the information they’d had, which should have been enough to make the NSA jealous. Which meant Gavin had the info. Which brings Gilfoyle right back to square one, which is that there’s no way Gavin could have known.

No, not square one. Square one was Gilfoyle doubting himself, which he’s still pissed about. Now, he’s dead sure there’s no way he made a mistake. And if he wasn’t even caught out by a wiretapping refrigerator, hearth of the modern home, then there’s only one explanation left. And it hadn’t made any sense when it was Seppen, because they would have had to already know in order to be mad at Pied Piper, but Gavin, Gavin hates their guts already, and Gavin has every reason to want them torn to pieces, and Gavin is definitely not above dirty tactics.

Gilfoyle relaxes all at once, feeling the cloud of desperation around him lift suddenly and wholly, to be replaced by something much more familiar and welcome: murderous rage. Social engineering he understands. He’s surrounded by people, and he’s always known they were the weakest link in Pied Piper’s security. He’s not happy about it, but he’d long ago accepted that it was the one vulnerability he couldn’t plug. Having Seppen admit they hadn’t seen a trace of him on their network just seals the deal to what he’d already started to suspect. He waits until Seppen leaves, until Jared finishes crying about his breadmaker or whatever, and it’s just the four of them in the kitchenette.

“We’ve got a mole,” Gilfoyle tells them.

Jared surprises him with his dedication. He knew the guy had a dark streak in him, but it turns out a thirst for vengeance is something they can very much connect on. Gilfoyle is mostly used to hacking for fun or out of the occasional sense of anarchic justice, but he’s happy to unleash his skills on whoever dared to fuck them over. He and Jared split the workload, and Jared turns up the encrypted emails first. The fact that it’s Jeff just makes the whole thing sweeter. He’s a stallion, and for a moment, Gilfoyle admits the possibility that he’s just privacy-minded. Gilfoyle has sent plenty of encrypted emails himself, only sometimes to nefarious ends. But he doesn’t bother lying to himself that he won’t be happy to prove Dinesh’s new best friend is a fucking traitor.

It’s a mild salve that Gilfoyle has to at least work to crack the encryption, that they weren’t played by a complete idiot. Then again, to really earn Gilfoyle’s respect, he should have hacked them for real. He worked for them, for fuck’s sake. He had the easiest in in the world. He could have noticed the dates that their files were moved around, even if there’s no trace of them on the fridges.

But no. He chose social engineering on Dinesh, probably the easiest mark in the whole office. It wasn’t worthy of his rank as a stallion. And honestly, of course it was Dinesh. It’s not like they broadcast the Melchor shitstorm to the rest of their employees, or Jeff would have known just by virtue of working at Pied Piper. One of the core team talked. It could have been Richard. Gilfoyle is slightly less suspicious of Jared. He knows it wasn’t him. So of course it was Dinesh.

He and Jared gather Richard and Dinesh and head to Jeff’s house. They fill in the other two along the way.

“Jeff?” Dinesh asks pitifully. “Stallion Jeff?”

“Your new best friend,” Gilfoyle points out, and Dinesh turns in his seat, narrowing his eyes.

“Wow,” he says, and Gilfoyle tenses, looking studiously out the window and away from Dinesh. “You’re jealous,” Dinesh accuses. Gilfoyle bites his tongue, because he doesn’t really want to have this fight in front of Richard and Jared, of all people. Not that he has a lot of say in it at this point. All he can do is sit and take it with all the dignity he can muster, seatbelted into the backseat of Jared’s Prius. He’s having flashbacks to being eight years old, a different car, but no less trapped. He takes a deep breath, and tells himself he could throw himself out of the moving car if he really had to. He has options. “I knew you were, no matter what you said. You don’t like that I can make my own friends. News flash: I’m not sucking Jeff’s dick!”

Gilfoyle breathes, hands tight on his thighs, and doesn’t reach for the door handle. “Don’t flatter yourself. Jared was the one who found the suspicious emails and brought him into this. I’ve just been trying to keep myself and this company out of prison. So take your bullshit insecurities and shove them right up the ass Jeff hasn’t touched.”

The front seat is eerily quiet, but Gilfoyle doesn’t bother to look up to check. If he knows them at all, Richard is staring at his lap and wishing the seat would eat him, and Jared is doing his best to genuinely not listen, and fretting about how impossible that is in the Prius’ thirty-some cubic feet of passenger space.

“I don’t believe you,” Dinesh fires back, and Gilfoyle shrugs, staring out the window.

“Suit yourself.”

“You guys know Gilfoyle planted that evidence, right?” Dinesh demands, leaning into the front seat, completely unable to read a room — or car, in this case. Jared and Richard clearly want nothing to do with their fight, but they haven’t yet discovered the option of hurling themselves from moving vehicles. “Those emails are fake. You think he can’t do that?”

_I’m flattered_ , Gilfoyle wants to say, but the words stick in his throat. He doesn’t say anything at all.

When he puts the nail through Dinesh’s laptop, he’s perfectly aware of what he’s doing, and Dinesh knows it too. It’s not just Dinesh he’s mad at. He’s really enjoying driving high-velocity metal through every hard drive he can find in Jeff’s apartment. It’s partly a basic tribalism he knows he’s not above. This guy fucked with their company. It’s personal, because Gilfoyle spent way too much mental and emotional energy during that awful day when he thought, beyond all his rationalizing, that he’d sunk the company through his own mistake. But Gilfoyle doesn’t fuck up, not like that, and fuck Jeff for making him think he had.

And fuck Dinesh too, by the way, for being a needy little bitch who poured out their deepest secrets all because Gilfoyle dared to not despise one of their co-workers. This is why monogamy is bullshit.

When they get back that night, he sends Dinesh out for toilet paper, and then changes the locks. It’s against their rental agreement, but that’s not really his priority at the moment. Dinesh comes back and works the lock for a few minutes, then knocks. “Gilfoyle?”

“If I can plant fake evidence against your friend, I can change a deadbolt,” Gilfoyle says through the door.

“This is my apartment!” Dinesh whines.

“Choke on my balls,” Gilfoyle retorts. Then he puts in his headphones and ignores the pounding on the door.

_You have to let me in sometime,_ Dinesh eventually texts.

A few minutes later: _I’m sorry._

Gilfoyle stares at that text for a long few minutes, and finally realizes the emotion buzzing under his skin is only half anger. The other half is hurt, plain and simple.

He wants to stay mad at Dinesh, but the truth is, he did this to himself. He gave Dinesh the power to hurt him. Sure, any co-worker could have tattled on him, though it would take Dinesh’s particular brand of idiocy to pick the one spy in their company to drunkenly confess secrets to. But it hurts because he trusted Dinesh, and that was entirely within Gilfoyle’s control.

He stays up late, playing mindless videogames in an effort not to think about it anymore, an effort that gets prolonged when he looks down to see another text from Dinesh. _Are you breaking up with me?_

At that point he starts drinking as well, until his brain is a mush of alcohol and digital gore and puzzles. He doesn’t feel better, but at least his brain is stuck in a videogame groove by the time he finally falls asleep to the flickering light of the screen, instead of stewing over his pathetic choice of boyfriends.

The morning brings a sense of perspective, and a realization that kicking Dinesh out permanently will be more of an ordeal than letting him back in, and Gilfoyle is sick of thinking about this whole mess. He changes the locks back and answers Dinesh’s text.

_No._

_Do you want to talk about it?_ Dinesh types back.

_Absolutely not,_ Gilfoyle answers. And they don’t. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The conclusion.

Dinesh finds him that night, smoking a cigarette on the balcony and watching the headlights below.

“Fuck Jeff, right?” Dinesh tries, and Gilfoyle turns his head, letting his face speak for him.

Dinesh winces. “Okay, fine, fuck me too. But can’t we just hate him together? He screwed all of us.”

“And why is that?” Gilfoyle thought he’d worked out most of his anger with the nail gun and the locks. Plus there’s something immensely weird about seeing Jared go off the deep end that usually resets Gilfoyle’s own bullshit meter. But that doesn’t mean he’s okay. He’s still quite a ways from okay, actually.

“Because he’s a ratfuck,” Dinesh says immediately, and Gilfoyle narrows his eyes. Dinesh swallows. “And because I spilled our deepest secret.”

“Because?” he presses.

“Because I was jealous you were hanging out with Monica,” he admits.

“This is why monogamy is bullshit,” Gilfoyle says, and Dinesh winces. He shuffles a bit on the balcony, putting his hands in his pockets, then taking them out.

“Do you miss sleeping with other people?”

“No.” Typical of Dinesh to miss the point. “You’re like a fucking infection, and loathe as I am to admit it, I don’t actually want anything outside of us. But monogamy breeds a sense of possession that’s beneath us as nominally civilized humans. I don’t give a shit if you go grab a drink with someone, and I’m not killing my own social calendar because I also happen to love you. I would prefer if you didn’t sink our livelihood and expose me to felonies and deportation over your own insecurities though.”

“I’m sorry.” He sounds it too, which makes it worse, somehow. “I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t do it because I was mad at you.”

And there’s the rub. Because that also makes it worse. Gilfoyle could take being the subject of anger, even hatred. It’s familiar territory for them after all. But to be almost undone by sheer carelessness, when Gilfoyle was stupid enough to let someone close enough to have that much power over him — it makes his skin crawl. And he still can’t walk away, but he hates himself a little for what he’s becoming — what he’s become.

He shrugs. “Apologies are meaningless. Change something.”

“I’m working on it. I don’t really have any practice with this,” Dinesh confesses. “You’re already my longest relationship by a lot.”

“No shit.”

Dinesh sidles up alongside him, and Gilfoyle stands still and lets it happen. He lets Dinesh wrap his arms around him, and lean in to mouth at his neck. Dinesh is earnest and clearly trying to make amends, and Gilfoyle doesn’t have any reason not to let him. Dinesh unbuttons his pants, then herds him back inside and toward their bed, all out of order as usual.

Gilfoyle is tired, and Dinesh’s hand on him feels good, and afterwards they fall asleep together, Dinesh’s arm hanging loosely over his stomach.

* * *

 

But it doesn’t end there. It can’t. The spell is broken, and when Gilfoyle looks at where they’ve ended up, it doesn’t look as rosy as it did before. It’s not that he feels the need to break things off immediately, but it is time for some serious backpedaling.

He changes all his passwords, even the null-security ones, even though he hadn’t given most of them to Dinesh anyway. He stops auto-trashing his reminders about bands he’d stopped following, church functions he’d stopped attending. He starts going out again.

Dinesh watches him go and guiltily accepts Gilfoyle’s new plans as his due punishment. Which isn’t the point, but Gilfoyle doesn’t bother educating him. Dinesh asks to go with him, which makes Gilfoyle scoff. Dragging Dinesh along to a metal show or a Satanist meeting would actually be punishment for both of them.  

After two weeks, Gilfoyle pulls on his jacket, sliding his keys into his pocket, and Dinesh throws down his controller, not even pausing his game. “I get it. I fucked up. If you’re gonna break up with me, fucking do it.”

Gilfoyle stares at him, glued to his place on the floor. He wants to say, “Okay, then.” That’s what comes next, after all. But he can’t make himself do it. Over Dinesh’s shoulder, his character sways absently and peers around, oblivious to the robotic dinosaur charging toward her across the field.

“No,” he says instead.

“Then tell me what you want, because this is shit, what’s happening right now. You won’t talk to me, you barely look at me. Why are you even here?”

“I don’t know,” Gilfoyle says. In the background, Dinesh’s character is now getting tossed around like a chew toy. Gilfoyle feels like one of them should pause the game, but he doesn’t want to walk over himself, and even he knows derailing this conversation isn’t in either of their interests. “But when the cards were down, you weren’t there. So you tell me why I’m still here.”

Dinesh looks at him, wide-eyed. “I know,” he says, surprising Gilfoyle. “I know I wasn’t. But I don’t know how to undo that. And, dude, you have not been helpful in figuring that out. So, I don’t know. Do you want to meet my parents? Do you want me to come out on Facebook? Because I will. I’ve been thinking about it. And I,” he stares at Gilfoyle, painfully earnest. “I think you’re it. I was almost hoping you’d get hit by a car or something, just so I could step up, except then I started having nightmares about exactly that, so I don’t really want it. So what can I do?”

“I don’t know,” Gilfoyle repeats. He could have really lived the rest of his life without seeing that crushed look on Dinesh’s face, but he can’t bring himself to say anything to fix it either.

He still goes out, but when he gets back that night and crawls into bed, he finds himself huddling up against Dinesh’s back. He could say it’s because his feet are cold. But it’s not.

* * *

 

Gilfoyle gets home a few days later to find a six-pack of Old Rasputin in the fridge and an actual gift basket of new electronics on the kitchen table. Dinesh hovers near the table, transparently watching Gilfoyle’s reaction. So Gilfoyle lets him see it, because it’s mostly disappointment. There’s also a flare of hurt he can’t pin down, so he swallows that instead. He’ll figure out what that’s about later.

He flicks through the games, the spare hard drives, and what the fuck? “Do you actually know me?” he demands. It’s not totally fair. There are a few good pulls in there. But a lot of it looks like Dinesh might have just picked anything Gilfoyle didn’t already own, which is usually for a reason.

“You’re hard to shop for,” Dinesh points out, softer than Gilfoyle expected. He’s not wrong, but Gilfoyle is well past awarding participation points. In fact, he’s pretty sure that’s what got him into this trouble in the first place.

He takes a beer out of the pack, popping off the bottle cap. “I’m just above bribes,” he says. Dinesh takes a breath to say something else, but Gilfoyle walks out of the kitchen, heading back to the bedroom and shutting the door. As expected, Dinesh is too chicken to follow him, at least until much later, when he slinks in to brush his teeth.

* * *

 

On Saturday, Gilfoyle wakes up to the smell of coffee and pancakes, and seriously considers breaking things off then and there. He’s not sure he can take Dinesh’s apologies anymore.

When he walks out of the bedroom though, the kitchen table is empty, and instead the coffee table is the one stocked with breakfast food and a full pot of coffee. The tv is on, and there’s a familiar logo on the screen. Two controllers sit side-by-side next to the pancakes and syrup and coffee mugs.

“Please sit down,” Dinesh says, and Gilfoyle does, crossing his arms.

“Playing videogames together isn’t going to suddenly make us cool again,” he warns.

“I know,” Dinesh says carefully. “But I think it might help. Look, you have every right to be mad. But I am sorry, and at some point, you have to forgive me. And I thought, maybe if we spend some quality time together, it might help us.”

Gilfoyle stares at him, trying to piece this together. Clearly Dinesh has planned this, run through his lines, but that shouldn’t be news. Dinesh is a trainwreck of a person, so it’s no surprise he practices before emotionally charged conversations. But Gilfoyle’s made a hobby of picking Dinesh apart, and something about this exchange doesn’t ring true. “Did you read some Dear Abby or something before you got up this morning?”

Dinesh grimaces. “I talked to Jared last night.”

“And he said we should play videogames?” Gilfoyle asks, dubious. He’d expect something a little more analytical than that.

Dinesh hesitates, then admits, “He had me take a test about love languages.” Gilfoyle raises his eyebrows, gesturing for Dinesh to continue. “Oh my God,” he mutters, but keeps going. “So it’s about how you express your feelings. My primary languages are gifts and verbal affirmation, but we talked about yours, and how they’re probably more about quality time and acts of devotion. Which is why what I did hurt you so much. And why my apologies aren’t the kind you want.”

That sounds... uncomfortably true.

“So I thought we should spend some time together, and I wanted us to do something to bring us closer again. Because we suck at talking, and we should probably get better at that, but for now I just want us to be cool again.”

“So you’re going to let me beat your ass digitally.”

“It’s Portal 2. I thought we could play co-op.”

Gilfoyle looks at the pancakes again and then shrugs. He picks up a fork in one hand and a controller in the other, and starts navigating through menu screens.

The thing is, he does like playing games with Dinesh, even if he is used to mostly getting to kick his ass. They don’t play co-op very often, and they’re not at their best, but after a few levels, he can feel them both relaxing. He thinks about fighting it, but he can’t solve these puzzles without talking to Dinesh, and besides, he’s tired of being angry.

By the time his stomach is growling at him again about lunch, they’re on the last puzzle, and when they finish, victorious, Dinesh turns to him and gives him the most earnest kiss Gilfoyle has ever received. “I love you,” he whispers, clutching at the back of Gilfoyle’s neck. “I miss you.”

Gilfoyle swallows, and knows he’s going to forgive him, now or later. “I’m right here,” he points out, though he knows what Dinesh means. And when Dinesh pushes him down on the couch and kisses him hard, over and over, like he might disappear off the couch, Gilfoyle takes it, touches him back just as carefully, because he has missed this.

* * *

 

The house re-opens, and Richard moves back in. It’s technically Bighead’s house, and he offers to let Dinesh and Gilfoyle move back in as well, rent-free. Dinesh looks at him as if for permission, and Gilfoyle knows it’s really a different question. 

“Not a chance in hell,” he tells Bighead and the rest of the assembled group. Dinesh’s poker face is still awful, but Gilfoyle doubts anyone but him will be able to read the lovesick look Dinesh gives him for his response. To the casual observer, Gilfoyle imagines he mostly looks like he might have left the oven on, and like Gilfoyle’s face might hold the answer.

Richard looks like he’s not sure whether he should be miffed or relieved. Jared’s the one who looks heartbroken. “But, you’re the gang! The team! Remember the magic?”

“I’m enjoying the magic of the simple life,” Gilfoyle says, watching Dinesh out of the corner of his eye. “And getting to fuck my boyfriend on the couch whenever I want.” Even that doesn’t make the sappy look on Dinesh’s face fade, and Gilfoyle knows then he’s going to be unbearably tender and earnest tonight. There might be roses. “Unless you’re into that, dick?”

“No,” Richard says quickly. “No, that’s okay. You guys enjoy your place.” He still hasn’t caught on about the name. Or he has and he’s too scared to call Gilfoyle on it. Either one is fine with him.

* * *

 

It feels different after that, having the house by choice instead of by necessity. It’s not the same as it was before, the magical and heady rush of something new, but Gilfoyle wonders if this is what adulthood is supposed to be. Choosing things for yourself. Even things that take work.

They’re playing Monster Hunter World when Gilfoyle mentions getting a second cat.

“Oh my God, you’re going to be one of those crazy cat people,” Dinesh says, not looking away from the digital cat he’s currently dressing up in a pirate hat and eyepatch, and completely ignoring the irony. “No. I’m serious this time.”

This one is grey and lost an eye sometime in his early life on the streets, so Gilfoyle names him Odin. Dinesh looks at him with revulsion the first time he enters the house and finds him perched on their couch, watching him keenly with his one good eye, still scrawny from his time on the streets. 

“You could have at least picked one that wasn’t defective.”

“He has personality,” Gilfoyle says easily, and Dinesh squints at him.

“What are you, the witch king of unwanted cats?”

Gilfoyle rolls his eyes, but Dinesh just walks closer, poking him in the chest. “You are. You’re taking the ones no one else wants. How did I ever find you intimidating?”

Gilfoyle hooks his ankle behind Dinesh’s sweeps his leg aside, toppling them both onto the couch and causing Odin to spring away. “You’re still letting me keep him,” he points out.

“That’s just because I love you,” Dinesh argues, and Gilfoyle kisses him. The conversation is too stupid to continue anyway, and for once he’s happy to let Dinesh have the last word.

* * *

 

The company goes ass-up again, and Gilfoyle saves the day. Again. Dinesh helps a little, and Richard does what he does best, which is be a waste of time and an asshole, so really the whole thing plays to everyone’s strengths. Okay, technically, Dinesh figures it out first, but that’s what significant others are for, is to pick up the slack when you’ve had nothing but coffee and whiskey and zero sleep in 24 hours, and Gilfoyle was right behind him, so the point is that Gilfoyle and Dinesh fucking rule.

When Dinesh returns to the office, triumphant, it’s Gilfoyle he looks to first. “We’re good?” he asks, still moving forward. They’ve been texting nonstop through the entire ordeal, but Gilfoyle doesn’t even bother to look askance at him.

“We’re good,” he confirms. He’s almost smiling himself.

Dinesh gives a whoop and then kisses Gilfoyle, in front of Richard and Jared and Danny and Becky and Baphomet, and he doesn’t even look around afterward. “We fucking rule,” he says, still grinning at Gilfoyle, shameless and happy.

“I know,” Gilfoyle says.


End file.
